Polyester Prince-The Real Story of Dhirubhai Ambani(Banned in India)

NTRODUCTION:AN INVITATIONTO BOMBAYThe envelope was hand-delivered to our house in Golf Links, Tan enclave in New Delhiwhose name captured the clubbable lifestyle of its leisured and propertied Indian resi-dents, soon after we had arrived in the middle of a north Indian winter to begin a longassignment. It contained a large card, with a picture embossed in red and gold of the elephant-headed deity Ganesh, improbably carried on the back of a much smallermouse. Dhirubhai and Kokilaben Ambani invited us to the wedding of their son Anil toTina Munim in Bombay.In January 1991, just prior to the explosion in car ownership that in later winters keptthe midday warmth trapped in a throat-tearing haze overnight, it was bitterly cold mostof the time in Delhi. Our furniture had still not arrived-a day of negotiations about the

duty payable lay ahead at the Delhi customs ofce where the container was brokenopen and inspected-and we camped on ofce chairs and fold-up beds, wrapped in blan

-kets.The Indian story was also in a state of suspension, waiting for something to happen.The Gulf War, which we watched at a big hotel on this new thing called satellite televi-sion, was under- cutting many of the assumptions on which the Congress Party’s familydynasty, the Nehrus and Gandhis, had built up the Indian state. The Americans wereunleashing a new generation of weap- ons on a Third World regime to which New Delhihad been close; its Soviet friends were standing by, even agreeing with the Americans.The Iraqi invasion of Kuwalt had pushed up oil prices and forced the Indian Governmentto evacuate some three million of its citizens working in the Gulf. The extra half-billiondollars all this cost India was pushing the country close to default on its foreign debt.

Ofcials from the Ministry of Finance were already negotiating a bail-out from the IMFin Washington; the IMF was setting stiff ‘conditionalities’-in effect a complete shift from

Nehru’s model of high external protection for the economy and government allocationof savings. Even the CNN clips of Tomahawk cruise missiles zipping neatly down thestreets of Baghdad were in themselves part of another breach in India’s walls. The cliteswho ran the national TV monopoly or the big newspapers no longer had India’s half-illiterate population tothemselves.Little of this was admitted in New Delhi. The coalition government of V P Singh, whichhad swept out the glamorous Rajiv Gandhi on a battery of corruption scandals, had it-

self collapsed in November after less than a year in ofce. India was ruled by an even

smaller coalition of opportunists under a wily politico called Chandrashekhar, kept in

ofce at Rajiv’s pleasure for who knew how long. Everyone clung to the autarkic, Third

World verities. Politicians and journalists pounced on the slightest admission by their

fellows that perhaps India’s vision of the world had been awed and it had better adjust

to the new order. At the Ministry of External Affairs, in the red sandstone majesty of Sir

Herbert Baker’s Secretariat buildings, a bright young ofcial on a new economic deskassured me that India’s nances were strong enough to take the strains. At a partyof intellectuals’ young academics and lmmakers in rough cotton kurta-payjama suits

scoffed at the prospects for satellite TV. How would the advertising payments get out tothe broadcaster through the maze of foreign exchange controls? Which foreign compa-nies would want to plug products they could neither export to India nor make locally?The wedding invitation was a good excuse to break away from this stalemate in NewDelhi, and make contact with the Indian commercial class in Bombay. There it looked as

if a raw entrepreneurial spirit was straining to break through the discouraging politicalcrust. Word of the Ambani family and their company Reliance Industries had spread to

Hong Kong as prime examples of this brash new India which might nally have its day,

courtesy of the changes the Gulf War symbolised.Everything about the Ambanis, in fact, was a good magazine story The young couple’scourtship had been a stormy one, ready-made for the Bombay show-biz magazines.

The bride, Tina Munim, was a girl with a past. She had been a lm starlet, featur

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ing in several of the Hindi-language lms churned out by the hundreds every year in ‘Bollywood’-most including improb- able violence, song-and-dance routines, and long

sequences with the female leads in wet, clingy clothes. Before meeting Anil, Tina hadhad a heavy, well-publicised affair with a much older actor. The groom, Anil, was thetearaway one of the two Ambani boys. His parents had frowned on the match. Bom-bay’s magnates usually tried to arrange matches that cemented alliances with otherpowerful business or political families. This one was not arranged, nor did it bring anymore than a certain popularity. Hired assailants had been sent with acid and knives to

scar Tina’s face, so went the gossip (apocryphal: Tina’s face turned out to be awless).Anil had threatened suicide if he could not marry Tina, went another rumour. Finally,

the parents had agreed.

The father, Dhirubhai, was no less colourful and even more controversial. He had rst

worked in Aden in the 1950s. I recalled a stopover there in my childhood, aboard theS. S. Oronsay, a buff-hulled Orient Line ship, en route to my father’s posting in Londonwith his Australian bank in 1958. The image was of grim, dark-brown peaks surround-ing a harbour of brilliant blue, a host of merchant ships tied up to moorings, and a busy

trafc of launches and barges. The trip ashore was by launch, landing at Steamer Point,

where Arabs and Indians besieged the white faces, trying to sell us Ottoman-stylecushions or to drag us into their duty-free shops. Now someone like those desperatesalesmen in Aden was a tycoon in Bombay.Ambani had got into polyester manufacturing in a big way, and got huge numbers of Indians to invest in shares of his company, Reliance Industries. In India, the home of

ne cotton textiles, it seemed that people couldn’t get enough polyester. The only con

-straint on local producers like Reliance was the government’s licensing of their capacity,or where they built their factories. To jack up his capacity, Ambani had become a big

political xer. In the recent minority government formation, it was said, his executives

had been shuttling briefcases of cash to politicos all over Delhi. There had been epicbattles, with the press baron Ramnath Goenka of the Indian Express and with a tex-tile rival from an old Parsi business house, Nusli Wadia. A year or so earlier, a Reliancepublic relations manager had been arrested for plotting to murder Wadia. The man hadbeen released, and nothing was moving in the case. Was it genuine or a frame-up? In-dian colleagues were not sure: no conspiracy was accepted at face value.

So we took our rst trip inside India, making our way down to New Delhi Railway Sta

-tion in a yellow-and-black cab, one of the 1954 Morris Oxford design still being madein Calcutta, in the rose-coloured haze of a winter afternoon; letting a red-shirted porterheave our bags on his head and lead us to the train, establishing our rights to the cov-

eted two-berth compartment in the middle of the First Class Air-Conditioned carriage

from the list pasted by the door.

The train slid across the at beige northern landscape of wheat-stubble and square

houses as night fell. In the morning we were trundling past palm trees and mangrove-bordered creeks before humming into Bombay through suburban stations packed with

commuters.If New Delhi was a city of books, discourse, seminars and not much action or precision,

Bombay was one where people made the most of the nine-to-ve working day before

battling their way home to the distant suburbs. Most crucially, Bombay had acceptedthe telephone as a medium of dialogue-not merely as a preliminary to an exchange of letters setting up a meeting. It was also unashamedly concerned with money and num-

bers. New contacts like Pradip Shah, founder of India’s rst rating agency for corporate

debt, with the slightly alarming acronym of CRISL, or Sucheta Dalal, a business jour-

nalist at The Times of India, or Manoj Murarka, partner of the old stockbroking rm of

Batlivala & Karani, rattled off the details of industrial processes, forward- trading in thesharemarket or conversion dates of debentures at bewildering speed.The wedding was going to be big, so big that it was to take place in a football stadium,the same one where Dhirubhai Ainbani had held many of his shareholders’ meetings.But it began in an oddly casual way. As instructed, we went mid-afternoon to the Wo-dehouse Gymkhana Club, some distance from the stadium. There we found guestsmilling in the street outside, the men dressed mostly in lavishly cut dark suits andshowy ties, moustaches trimmed and hair brilliantined. The women were heavily madeup, laden with heavy gold jewellery, and wearing lustrous gold-embroidered silk saris.

Anil Ambani appeared suddenly from the club grounds, dressed in a white satiny outt

and sequinned turban, sitting on a white horse. A brass band in white frogged tunicsstruck up a brash, repetitive march and we set off in separate phalanxes of men andwomen around the groom towards the stadium. Every now and then, the process wouldpause while the Indian guests broke into a pro- vocative whirling dance, some hold-ing wads of money above their head. The stadium was transformed by tents, banks of

inarigolds and lights into a make-believe palace, and lled up with 2000 of the family’s

closest friends and business contacts. They networked furiously while a barechestedHindu pundit put Anil and Tina through hours of Yedic marriage rites next to a smoul-

dering sandalwood re on a small stage. Later, the guests descended on an elaborate

buffet on tables taking up an entire sideline of the football pitch, starting with all kindsof samosas and other snacks, working through a selection of curries and breads, and

nishing with fruits and sweets wrapped in gold leaf. The next day, the Ambanis put onthe same spread-if not the wedding ceremony at another reception for 22000 of their

not-so-close. friends, employees and second-echelon contacts.Retrospectively, by the standards of Bombay a few years later, it looks a modest andtraditional affair. Before their joint marriage of three children in 1996, the ingratiatingHinduja family had an elaborately illustrated book prepared on the Hindu marriage andsent to all invitees. Other business alliances were celebrated with elaborate stage-setsbased on the ancient epics; lines of elephants led the processions of the grooms anddiamonds were pasted to the foreheads of women guests. But at the time, the sheersize of the wedding was seen as a sign that Dhirubhai Ambani had made it through thepolitical travails of 1989~90 and was unabashed-and certainly not strapped for cash orfriends.

It was attering to be there and to have a Reliance public relations manager take me upto meet the Ambanis-attering, within a month of arriving in India, to meet the coun

-try’s fastest moving, most controversial tycoon. An interview was promised shortly,once the festivities were over. An early cover story was clearly a possibility, an antidote

to the gloomy political news out of Delhi. It would help my standing at the Far Eastern

Economic Review if India was an upbeat business story and I was right on to it.That of course was the desired effect. Reliance was desperate to raise funds for expan-